A Place That Kills
by Claire D'Aubigne
Summary: Kyo sounded strange, and Iori frowned but didn't get to comment on it. “I-I can't get ahold of anybody else. I think they might be dead.” Iori, Kyo, and Rock Howard battle zombies in Southtown. First in a series. M for language and violence.
1. A Place That Kills

I'm not one for long author's notes, but I feel like I should explain myself on this one. It's not my usual style at all, but I wanted to challenge myself and work on something that I wasn't so good at. I managed _that, _all right. :/ I almost hate this, but I've been working on it for four days now and I'm already planning the sequels, which _will_ be better than this. I can't even decide if this has zero plot or lots of plot.

Anyway, no pairings yet (they might show up later, though), and if you're wondering about the random inclusion of Rock with Iori and Kyo--I didn't know who to use to complete the trio, so I tossed some names in a hat and he's what came out. I wanted a challenge, and that definitely was.

That being said, I hope you enjoy this. Or at least read through the whole thing. I know it sucks, so _please_ be gentle in your criticism. :)

* * *

It was almost midnight when the phone rang and Iori almost didn't answer it on principle. He glanced at the display, and that's what changed his mind, because it said it was Kusanagi calling. If Kusanagi was calling _him,_ there had to be a good reason.

"Didn't your mother ever teach you any manners?" he said instead of saying hello. "It's fucking-"

"Shut the fuck up and listen to me, Yagami." Kyo sounded strange, and Iori frowned but didn't get to comment on it. "I-I can't get ahold of anybody else. I think they might be dead."

He almost laughed, but there's something about Kyo's tone of voice that stopped him. "Are you drunk?"

"No, you stupid fuckwit, I'm not drunk. Have you even stepped out of your apartment in the past hour?"

He hadn't. Of course he hadn't. Iori sighed audibly and headed toward the front door, grabbing his keys and letting them jingle so that Kyo knew he was going. "Am I looking for something in particular?"

"You'll know. Just go outside."

Iori didn't make it past his front door. Kyo was right—he knew. There was _nothing_ outside. Usually, there were cars driving by and birds singing, dogs barking and children screaming. Tonight, there was nothing. He didn't see his neighbors, or anyone else for that matter, walking past.

_It's like he's the only person on earth. _He swallowed and resisted the urge to laugh because in his head, he sees a tumbleweed blowing by. "It's like this everywhere?" he managed to ask, after what seemed like an eternity. His voice was a lot steadier than he thought it would be.

"Everywhere," Kyo echoed. "Eerie, isn't it?"

Iori didn't want to answer. He struggled with it, finally managing to clear his throat as he backed into his apartment and shut the door, locking it because it irrationally made him feel a little better about the situation.

"I'm on my way over," Kyo said after a few minutes of silence. There was a flash of static, and the phone cut out briefly in the middle of his sentence. "-so it might take me a while. Don't leave your apartment. Try to call whoever you can, and get them there, too. There has to be something we can do."

"Yeah, okay." Iori felt strange saying it, knowing that he just agreed for Kyo Kusanagi to peacefully enter his living space. But tonight? He felt like letting the centuries old family rivalry have a day off.

* * *

It was one hour and fourteen minutes exactly before Kyo showed up. Iori had called everyone in his address book five times—not that there were many people. The four other guys in his band. Chizuru Kagura. Alba Meira. He skipped over Kyo's name.

The cell phones were the first to go. He still hadn't managed to get in touch with anyone, and busy signals were becoming more frequent. "Everybody has a cell phone and I still have to hear that fucking noise," he said softly, just to hear himself talk. His voice cut through the silence and echoed strangely, and he decided not to open his mouth again.

Later, the screen flashed to signal _no service_. Still, he kept the phone on, foolishly hoping that it was just some sort of glitch and it would come back on.

The power went out next. Iori lit candles and grabbed some water and tried to sit on the couch, but he couldn't stop pacing. His mind was racing with possibilities of what could have happened _out there_, each wilder and more impossible than the last. He remembered that he had a battery-powered radio in the closet somewhere, and decided to go look for it.

His head was in the closet when Kyo pounded on his door, making him jump and curse. "Goddamnit, Iori, let me in _now_!"

Kyo sounded frantic. Iori fumbled with the lock and then swung the door open, watching Kyo stumble in and catch himself just before he fell, and just managing to get a glimpse at the shadowy hallway and the figure that was heading towards them, just caught a hint of the sickly-sweet smell, heard the godawful, harsh, moaning wail coming from the _thing's_ mouth-

Kyo recovered, and slammed the door shut before Iori's brain could process these things individually, much less put them together. He locked the doorknob and sent the deadbolt sliding home before turning to meet Iori's gaze. He was panting slightly.

"Sorry," he huffed, leaning against the wall. "I had to jog the last three miles, there are cars everywhere. And that son of a bitch heard me and came after me about seven blocks up the street. I would've called, but-" he waved his hand, wordlessly telling Iori that his phone wasn't working either.

Something hit Iori's door and they both jumped, Kyo taking a couple of steps backward on instinct. "I don't think he can get in," he murmured quietly. "They seem... I don't know, they seem pretty _stupid,_ actually. Like..." he trailed off, turning to glance at Iori uncertainly.

_Zombies,_ Iori's mind helpfully supplied. It wasn't the craziest theory he'd come up with, but it wasn't exactly the most plausible, either. He shook his head, headed to the worthless refrigerator and produced a bottle of water for Kyo. On the other side of the door, the thing scratched, sounded like it was trying to walk through the door. Iori watched the doorknob to see if it would turn, trying to tune out the sickening thud of the thing's head hitting the wood, and closed his eyes.

They stood silently in the hallway until the noises stopped. "I think he's leaving," Kyo whispered, taking a few cautious steps forward to peer through Iori's peephole. "Yeah. He's gone."

Iori held up the radio, still clutched in his hand. "Remembered I had this," he said, holding it up. "It's battery-operated and the range isn't spectacular, but it's worth a shot." He hesitated, then turned away and led Kyo further into his apartment, where the candles had burned down more than he'd realized. He had another box somewhere; he'd have to find them after the sun came up.

If the sun came up at all. It hit him that he really didn't know.

"What's going on out there, Kusanagi?" Iori asked. "Why're you here? You have family, and your girlfriend-"

"Yeah, well, I can't go to them," Kyo snapped. He turned away. "You already know I wouldn't just call you to say hi. M-maybe I would've dropped a hint about this just because you're a human being, whether I hate your guts or not. Those are _people_ out there, Yagami, or they _were._ And they don't deserve this shit. Nobody does."

* * *

The sun did rise, at the same time it always did. They hadn't slept the night before, but they hadn't talked anymore, either.

"I think I found a station!" Kyo called, and a second later, Iori came out, a can of food in each hand. "It's full of static, but they're saying... there are living people out there."

Iori noticed the distinction but didn't mention it. "_...scue attempts... appears t—be isol... -family members."_

Kyo's eyes met Iori's. "I couldn't get it any clearer," he murmured softly in the middle of the broadcast.

"_-oing off the air-"_

"Doesn't look like it's doing much good anyway," Iori replied tersely. He held up the food he'd found. "We have enough to last about three days. Twice that, if we only eat once per day." They couldn't trust the stuff he'd been keeping in the refrigerator, water being the exception, and he'd never noticed how little food he kept around until he needed it.

"We'll have to go out eventually, I guess," Kyo replied, sitting back. He looked disappointed.

"At least the radio said it was isolated." _I think,_ Iori added in his head.

"Yeah, well, the radio said that there were rescue attempts, too." Kyo took a deep breath, then glared hard at the table. "So do we have a plan? We're going to have to leave—if this is isolated, then maybe we can get out. Maybe we can meet some living people on the way."

"We can pack up the food and some water. It won't be much to carry, so if we have to run from them, at least we'll be able to do it. And we can always light them on fire if they get too close."

"That doesn't work. I tried it." Kyo met his eyes, leaning forward. "It's like they can't feel that they're getting burned at all. Like a giant ball of flame coming right at you. It's crazy."

Iori resisted the urge to laugh, looked away to compose himself. Inside the apartment, this was all a little surreal. They tried to keep quiet and conserve what they had and it was boring, but really, he could almost pretend that this was normal. "I think I have a box of candles somewhere," he said at last. "I should try to find them while it's still light. And anything else that might help us out."

"D'you have any weapons?" Kyo asked. "I mean like, guns or something. We can't let them get close."

"Do I want to know how you know that?"

Kyo ignored him. "Let's find your candles," he said instead, standing up and keeping his eyes downcast. "We should probably try to get some sleep tonight, wait until tomorrow before we leave. Daylight and all that. And we don't want to go out if we're tired."

Iori nodded. He recognized the dismissal well enough, and he was going to have to know something more before they took to the streets, but for now he'd leave Kyo to wallow in whatever he knew.

* * *

They slept in shifts in Iori's living room, starting as soon as they'd scoured his apartment from top to bottom and gathered everything they could see as being useful. They'd have to go through it before they left to see what was a necessity and what wasn't—they couldn't take everything; it'd weigh them down too much and Iori still didn't know what they were dealing with.

They'd started sleeping right after their evening meal (corn for Kyo, beans for Iori) and because of that, plus all of the tension lately, they found themselves awake before sunrise. They sat side-by-side with their backs to the sofa, waiting silently for enough light to go through their loot.

"We were having a party," Kyo began softly, and Iori knew better than to turn his head and look or he'd break the spell. "My parents, a bunch of friends, me and Y-yuki." He closed his eyes briefly as he tripped over her name, but he managed to get ahold of his emotions and Iori still hadn't interrupted him. "I guess they were attracted to the noise or something, or maybe we smelled like food. I don't know. There were three of them. My dad just thought they were party crashers or something, so when one of them dove at him, he just went to punch it and it _bit_ him. Ripped the skin off of his hand—my dad's a big man. You know, strong. But it was nothing for this guy.

"People started running and it was kind of chaos for a little while, some of the slower ones or the more sympathetic ones going down every time one of the crashers got ahold of somebody. Yuki was with me, and she was trying to get me to leave because she was terrified. Wanted to go home and check on her parents, but I told her to wait. I mean, Dad had just gotten attacked by this guy and I wanted to make sure he was okay. My mother was right next to him, talking to him and trying to stop the blood from flowing. He was dead by the time I could get to him, and I was too busy torching the one that was coming from behind me to notice when he got my mom."

Kyo was crying, silently, but Iori didn't say anything. They might have been rivals and even enemies at one point, but he'd lost everything. Iori could give him a minute to grieve about it. He didn't even think Kyo had noticed it himself.

"Somewhere in the confusion I lost Yuki. I went back for her, of course, but half the fucking party guests had been bitten and they sorta ganged up on me, so I took off and called her. It went to voicemail. I don't know if that means... she could've still been alive."

He realized he was crying and wiped at his face, oddly thankful that Iori could at least give him some dignity. "Anyway, then I started calling people and you're the only one that picked up. I almost didn't call, but we've had each others' backs in a fight before, and I guess that means you could be trusted in an emergency."

In some weird, fucked up way, it made sense that they were sharing this. They'd shared a lot before, in some form or fashion. Iori cleared his throat, oddly thankful that the only family he had left was a drug addicted stepmother somewhere back in Japan. "Biting," he said, to take some of the emotional anguish off of his rival. "This is some big, fucked up cliché, Kusanagi."

"Yeah. But hey, if Hollywood got the biting part right, maybe the wasting zombies with a headshot part will be right, too. It'd probably save our asses," Kyo joked, the corner of his mouth tipping up in a smile. "Not that I really want to shoot anyone, but if it comes down to one of us or one of them-"

Kyo didn't have to finish.

* * *

They left around noon, careful to be as quiet as possible until they got to a place that had guns. Most of the zombies must have moved on. Still, they were careful to keep their voices low and their footsteps as quiet as possible.

"I think I'd feel better if we were being chased," Kyo admitted as they turned down their third empty street. "Do you think they're all dead?"

"Don't know," Iori replied. He adjusted his messenger bag, squinting ahead of them to see if he could identify a gun shop. _Somewhere_ with weapons. "I think there's a pawn shop up there," he said, pointing. "Maybe they'll have some guns."

"At least we're in the seedy part of town. There probably wasn't that many people here to begin with."

"This is Southtown," Iori quipped. "Everywhere is the seedy part of town."

The door to the pawn shop was gone, apparently ripped from its hinges, but it seemed empty. And they had guns. One wall was lined with hunting rifles and shotguns, and Iori went toward them, while Kyo checked out the handguns in the glass case.

"Do you even know anything about guns?" Kyo asked as he examined a solid black handgun. "Because I don't."

"You mean that all I had to do to beat you in a fight was to use a handgun, Kusanagi?"

Kyo made a soft noise of disdain in the back of his throat. "The whole fact that you'd have to stoop that low would mean that I won by default, Yagami." He smiled a little, relieved to be joking around even through a crisis.

"Did you hear that?" Iori asked suddenly, his head whipping toward the left. He had a shotgun in his hands—unloaded, but still possible to use as a club if he had to—and Kyo followed as he edged closer. They could both hear it now—a definite rustle. Iori cursed both of them for failing to secure the store before going to the guns.

"I hope to hell you guys are human," someone said. Kyo jumped, and Iori's hands tensed on the barrel of the gun. "Don't fucking shoot me, okay?"

A lanky blond boy, teenage, edged around the corner with his hands up. "I thought I recognized your voices."

"Rock Howard!" Kyo snapped, sighing. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Same thing you guys are, apparently. You can put that down, Yagami, they haven't bitten me. They got K' and Kula though, and after that I thought I might need some firepower."

Iori lowered the gun. "Have you run across anybody else?"

Rock shook his head. "Not since a few hours ago. Kula said they'd heard about an evacuation on the radio, but I'm willing to bet we've already missed that. I went by my apartment looking for Terry, but I just ran into a bunch of dead guys. Have you-?"

"We haven't seen anybody," Kyo replied softly. "I'm sorry."

Iori cleared his throat. "You should stick with us," he said, turning back to the weapons. "We stand a better chance of surviving if we're not on our own."

* * *

Kyo ended up shooting the first one. Iori ended up watching his back as he puked on the side of the road. By some unspoken agreement, they'd given Rock a gun but decided that he'd only shoot if they didn't have any other option. The kid was seventeen, and he didn't need that kind of memory. If he got out of this alive, anyway.

After the first time, killing became easier. Iori did most of the shooting; Kyo had his back. But Kyo threw up a lot afterward, and not only was that unhealthy, it slowed them down too much. Iori supposed that Kyo just lacked whatever it took to actually end someone's life—or unlife—while Iori had done something like that before, even if he had been possessed and couldn't remember it. And they kept walking.

He didn't know how many days it had been. It couldn't have been long, but their water supply was dwindling, they'd run out of canned food and were relying on swiping granola bars and bags of chips from convenience stores and gas stations on their route. Even the zombies were coming fewer and further between. Iori had been holding his breath, but they hadn't seen anyone they knew. Or used to know, or whatever. He just didn't know how willing he'd be to shoot someone with the face of an acquaintance.

Sleeping was a trick. Most of the time, it was an abandoned, hole-in-the-wall diner that nobody frequented. Thankfully, Rock seemed to be pulling his weight in that respect, always knowing where the lesser known places were located. They slept sitting up, in shifts, if they slept at all. The worst part was that they didn't seem to be getting any closer to the city limits.

They weren't sure what they'd find when they got there.

"I think we only have a couple of miles left," Rock said, while they were stopped on a break. "We could probably make it before dark, if we don't stop, and we don't run into anybody."

"Fuck it," Kyo said suddenly. "Let's go for it. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of this town."

They both turned to look at Iori, who shrugged. "I'm not your boss," he said, glancing between them. "I've been outvoted. I would've said let's go, anyway." They'd probably been more careful than necessary with traveling anyway, but at least they'd kept themselves—and each other—alive.

"Do you think it's really just isolated to Southtown?" Rock asked. "I mean, is it a virus like in the movies? Is it airborne? What if we get there and they won't let us out? What if there isn't anybody there _to_ let us out?"

"We won't think like that," Iori ordered firmly. He stood up, leaving the trash (like it mattered anyway, and they didn't need the added weight) and gathering his weapons. "If they won't let us out then we'll convince them. And there has to be something—there was a radio broadcast." It seemed like a dream by now, but it was all they had. It kept them walking, and for now that was all they could ask for.

Their eyes were just beginning to glaze over when they heard the familiar shuffle-step of the zombie. "Thought they'd all be dead by now," Kyo muttered dully as they assumed a defensive, back-to-back-to-back position.

And then Iori said softly, "Oh, fuck _me_ in church," which was the wrong thing to say because it made both Rock and Kyo turn their heads to see what he was talking about and that was _Benimaru Nikaido_ heading toward them. Kyo made a sick, helpless noise in the back of his throat.

It was to the point that even Iori felt sorry for Kyo, and he was tired, and he made the fatal mistake of turning to tell him that he didn't have to shoot. They had forgotten how quickly the undead moved, and the minute Iori turned his head, Benimaru lunged.

Iori got the shotgun up just in time to catch the zombie's neck, widening his stance on instinct. He skidded backward a couple of inches on impact, but didn't lose his balance. It was the closest any of them had gotten, and Iori knew better, but he couldn't help the fact that he focused on silly details. Benimaru's fetid breath, the sickly-sweet smell of decaying flesh, the way his skin was beginning to peel right off the bone along his hairline.

"Iori!" one of them called behind him.

He didn't have the advantage. "Fuck you, run!" he snapped. He'd been in some pretty fucked up fights before, but never against someone who had literally _zero_ pain reaction. And never against a dead person, either. "Go!" he repeated. "I can't-"

Benimaru, crazed with the smell of all the fresh food, gave another lunge and pushed Iori back another couple of inches. He tripped on a stray _something_ in the road, falling to the ground, still struggling against the zombie. He was alone now, he thought, and he figured that if he had any chance at all of scrambling to his feet and running after he'd been bitten, at least he still had the .357 he'd been carrying and a bullet to shoot himself.

Iori took a deep breath and relaxed his arms.

And Benimaru's head exploded. Iori didn't hear the shot until it had already happened. Instinctively, he pushed the half-headless body off of him, gasping.

"Christ, Kyo," Rock said softly.

Iori scrambled up, turning his head to take in the scene. Rock was staring at Kyo, and Kyo was staring at Iori, handgun raised and his eyes wide. Iori held his hands up in surrender, meeting Kyo's eyes and holding them, careful not to make any sudden moves.

"Did he get you," Kyo asked. It wasn't a question.

"No."

Kyo lowered the gun, then threw it to the side as he turned his back, dropping to his hands and knees as he vomited. Rock went for the gun. Iori cautiously approached Kyo.

"He was going to kill you."

"I know," Iori replied softly. "Thank you."

"You're not allowed to give yourself up for us. That's not allowed."

"Okay."

"I want to get the fuck out of this town. _Now._ I just killed my best friend and I. Want. Out."

* * *

Iori was sure, when they approached the gates, that something was going to go wrong. That the zombie outbreak hadn't just been contained to Southtown. That they'd be met with some sort of reinforced steel wall that had been built overnight and that they wouldn't be allowed through.

Even when he saw live, breathing humans patrolling, he didn't relax. He was covered in gore; Kyo and Rock were so covered in grime that he could hardly see their skin. There was no way they'd be considered okay.

But the patrol had taken one look at them and shuffled them into quarantine, giving them scalding showers and leading them to an area full of other recent survivors. They were shown to rooms that were blindingly white but that had clean, soft beds and warm food and water, and at last, Iori felt that they were _safe._


	2. Second Verse, Same as the First

Soiree had been the one to call them zombies.

He'd also been the one to insist that they evacuate as many people as possible before leaving themselves. He'd been the one doing the actual hauling-children-to-the-neutral-zone part of the job, too, while Alba mostly stuck around to cover his ass.

Soiree couldn't kill them. Soiree had never killed another person before, and even though the zombies weren't _people_ in the literal sense of the term, they still looked a lot like people. Alba had, and so he didn't have quite as much trouble as his twin.

And then—and then Soiree had picked up the wrong child, the eerily quiet one, thinking that it had been shock and not infection that kept the boy from screaming. Alba hadn't seen the zombie boy's mouth open, had turned to face his brother just in time to see teeth sink into Soiree's arm.

He knew the evacuation had come to an end. Soiree wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the safe point.

Alba didn't even consider leaving his brother. It's not like Southtown would need him—Southtown was dead, literally. He moved Soiree to their apartment, locked the door, but couldn't find the courage to end it before Soiree changed. In the end, he sat beside his twin and watched the light slowly leave his eyes.

Soiree begged him to leave until he couldn't talk anymore. Alba ignored him, grabbed a beer and didn't say a word until Soiree let a breath out and didn't take another.

Alba sighed, sat the rest of the beer down beside his brother and turned away. There wasn't anything to do for Soiree anymore. He made it to the door, looked out quickly to check for zombies, and made sure the door would lock so they couldn't get to his twin. His whole life, he'd taken care of Soiree, and that didn't change now.

The door closed behind him. Soiree opened his eyes.


	3. The Elephant in the Room

It was a nightmare in quarantine. Someone had found a county jail and declared it to be secure enough, so they aired the place out, repainted, tried to make it a little comfortable, and started sticking the survivors in there as they straggled to the neutral zone. There was some organization Iori'd never heard of that came through, took over the biggest holding cell, and converted it into some sort of lab. That was where they took the ones who were already infected but made it through the line.

Iori didn't know how there were still infected people living in Southtown. Well, infected people _unliving_ in Southtown. Surely they had to have some sort of food to survive—though, with all of the stragglers who were still making it to the neutral zone, maybe they actually did have food in there. He thought about asking the scientists, but he really didn't want to know.

They'd made it through the first night somewhere else before they'd been moved in here. It was to weed out the ones who'd been infected and didn't want to admit it, they'd been told, and they'd been separated. The next day, they'd been declared 'safe' and were allowed to see each other again, and Kyo had come straight over to Iori and stood in front of him, staring at him long and hard and finally trembling just a bit before turning and beckoning Rock over to them.

The three of them had been together for this long, and it seemed wrong somehow that they should be split up after all of this. The cells had four beds attached to the wall by chains, and since Iori was apparently their unofficial leader (and the one with the quickest reaction time and the least traumatic issues), he took the one closest to the cell door. Kyo parked himself across from Iori, and Rock took the bed behind Kyo's. There was a little window, not that anything was out there. Other than the zombies, Southtown was a wasteland.

The first twelve hours proved that they weren't safe, even in quarantine. One of the cells across from them was full of men, and one of them passed out. A few minutes later, he sat up again, and it only took a split second for one of the other guys to scream.

The scientists, and whatever other people were acting as guards, were there as quickly as they could be, and dragged the zombie out. They pulled the others out as well, like this was an everyday occurrence. They didn't say anything to anybody.

Behind them, Rock let out a groan.

Eight hours later, they met their fourth cell mate. The guards kind of tossed him in, but he caught himself, and didn't meet anyone's eyes. Iori and Kyo both turned to look at him, but Rock didn't move, just kept staring forward. Iori recognized him, vaguely, but it was hard to place the people they knew from tournaments when they were so out of their elements like this. Even Kyo didn't look like himself.

"...Alba Meira?" Would there be no end to the surprises this zombie outbreak threw at them?

The man turned his head. "Hello, Yagami. Kusanagi. ...Rock."

"I didn't recognize you without your glasses." Iori wanted to ask why he'd shown up without his twin, but he had a feeling he already knew the answer. Besides, he didn't push it.

As Alba sat on the fourth bed, Kyo murmured a hello, but Rock didn't budge. Alba frowned. "Is he okay?"

"He's not sick," Kyo replied. "We got out together—the three of us. None of us are infected. He was great until we got to quarantine, but he hasn't said anything since."

"Hasn't Terry made it yet?"

That did something, and Rock turned to Alba at last, looking as if he'd only just realized he was there. "You saw Terry?"

"He was... helping us evacuate the town," Alba said haltingly. "But Soiree-" he choked on his brother's name. "-I had to take care of him, and we got separated."

He didn't have to mention that Terry's chances of survival dwindled with every minute he had to spend in the abandoned town. Rock's eyes became unfocused again, and the four men didn't bother to speak anymore.

Their cell doors weren't locked, only slid closed, as the zombies hadn't quite figured out how to get past them yet. And they were allowed to go out and walk around what Iori had come to think of as a common area, as long as they were actually walking and not trying to eat people on their way out.

It was mostly abandoned at night, with the exception of the ever-watchful cameras set up by the science crew, and that was why Iori slid out of their cell and walked down there. He was almost positive he was the only one still awake—Rock had fallen asleep some time ago, still curled into a ball, and nobody had the heart to wake him; Alba looked just as close to falling apart as their teenaged companion but was at least still speaking, and had the good sense to lie down before he fell asleep. Kyo was muttering his dead girlfriend's name in his sleep.

Iori sat behind a fake potted plant in the corner and thought about his cellmates, and discovered he was rather glad he didn't have anybody to lose. He lived a lonely life, sure, but when a disaster struck, he'd been able to get himself out without much baggage.

He heard a noise in front of him and glanced up. Kyo was standing in front of him, in his too-large hospital scrubs that looked just like everybody else's, and without thinking, Iori shifted to make room for him on the miniature couch. Usually, he was protective of his personal space, but after their ordeal, he didn't complain about how close Kusanagi sat. Even in quarantine, there wasn't much human contact, and maybe Kyo needed that.

He'd killed his undead best friend to save Iori's life, and if nothing else, Iori owed him for that.

"Are you okay?" Kyo asked softly. It was like he didn't want to raise his voice and disturb the quiet of the commons.

"I think that, out of the four of us, I'm the one who is the most okay," Iori replied. He didn't say yes because he didn't know how anyone—even him—could come out of a zombie apocalypse and be okay at the end of it. He wanted, ironically, to asked _are you?_ But that would be unlike him, so he kept his mouth shut.

"I'm worried about Rock," Kyo continued. He didn't seem bothered that Iori didn't ask about his well-being. "He did so well keeping up with us when we were getting out."

"He's just a kid," Iori said. "Seventeen is too young to deal with these kinds of things—and have you noticed? He's close to the youngest person we've seen." He paused, letting that sink in. It was true: the survivors that had walked through the door had all been adults, or damn close to it. "Howard's spent this whole time with Bogard, trying to be something other than his father's son. And he had to murder people to get out alive. He will come to terms with it."

It surprised him to hear the words leave his mouth. Of course, all this was common knowledge thanks to the chain of gossip through the competitors of a King of Fighters tournament, which reached even antisocial Iori's ears.

"Maybe we'll be able to find Terry," Kyo murmured, but Iori didn't answer, and they fell into silence.

Kyo's head settled on Iori's shoulder and the redhead sighed, realizing Kyo had fallen asleep. _No baggage, indeed,_ he thought to himself. No, all of the baggage had shown up after they'd made it through. It had changed all of them, and what had he gotten out of it? Silly emotional attachments to a man he couldn't hate anymore and a kid he'd never really spent much time getting to know.

Iori gently nudged Kyo until he opened his eyes, and then hauled him to his feet and led him back to their cell.

He was startled to find that he'd actually fallen asleep as well. Quarantine had stopped feeling safe (maybe nothing would ever feel safe again), and Iori couldn't shake the feeling that he should be on watch while his companions slept. But when the guards came by with their breakfasts the next day, he was the only one still sleeping.

There hadn't been much effort put into the meal—a spoonful of scrambled eggs that were stuck to the plastic tray, a hard biscuit, two slices of paper-thin bacon and a cardboard container of orange juice—but it was food, and three of them ate it without complaining. Kyo and Alba tried to coax Rock into eating his, but the boy (he looked younger and younger to Iori) just shook his head. They thought it was improvement.

Iori did not. "Eat your breakfast," he growled at the boy in his best menacing voice. "The guards are already looking at you suspiciously. I heard they put the condemned back into the town for the zombies to eat. Is that what you want? Are you so useless that you would go back in there after you nearly died to get out?"

Alba and Kyo stared at him in horror, but Rock swallowed and reached for the orange juice.

"Good boy," Iori growled. Though he couldn't help but add, "Idiot."

"Be careful," Kyo muttered in his ear as he took his tray to the guard, after they'd finished eating. "It's starting to sound like you care."

They had no way of knowing how long they would have to stay in quarantine, but they'd managed to establish a routine after what Iori thought was a week. They were paraded outside two or three times, probably so they wouldn't get rickets, and sometimes they got to see people find their lost family members who hadn't been placed in the cell. Mostly, though, the people stuck to the groups they'd been assigned.

Iori had nobody to search for, other than Chizuru, and Kyo did that part for him. Kyo looked because Kyo had always been more popular with the fighters crowd than Iori, who loathed violence even more after this episode and didn't really want to mingle with any of them. Rock allowed his eyes to sweep over the crowd once in a while, but he stuck with Iori. And Alba didn't look at all.

After a couple of nights, he joined Kyo and Iori in the commons, which had become a normal nightly thing for them. There, they learned the truth of what had happened to Soiree and how Alba had intended to stay with him even after he'd died, but how cowardice had won for the first time in Alba's life.

"Self-preservation," Iori murmured quietly. "That's not cowardice."

"Soiree would have wanted you to get out and help take care of the survivors," Kyo added bracingly. Iori had forgotten that Soiree had been Kyo's friend as well. "Everything you worked so hard to accomplish..."

They never slept in the commons, always quietly making it back to their cell before Rock woke up and found himself alone again. They never spoke of what would happen when they got out, when Iori wasn't around to bully Rock into eating his food and Rock wasn't there to passively allow Alba to transfer all the big brother feelings onto him, and Kyo couldn't meet and hold Iori's gaze across the jail cell until they were able to go to sleep at night. They never spoke of the dead or the missing, and they never allowed themselves to hope that Southtown could be rebuilt after a catastrophe like this. They were only alive, and for now, that was all that they could focus on.


	4. Into the Midnight Sun

I keep up with author's notes on my journal, but I tend to neglect adding them over here and for that, I'm sorry. I won't take up much time or space, here, but I wanted to clarify that this is (as of the second chapter/story) AU Maximum Impact 2/2006-basically (spoiler)  
that both twins are still in Southtown (end spoiler).  
Also, I have pretty much mentioned every character I plan to write about (as of this chapter/story). There are still a few to go, but if I add someone else, it's unplanned. I still haven't decided if this is going to be Iori/Kyo in the end-I'm leaning towards it, but if that's the case, it will only be mild and hardly mentioned.  
Thank you, as always, for reading and reviewing.

* * *

Terry was, generally speaking, an optimistic guy. But even considering his glass-half-full outlook on the majority of his life, he felt like they were fucked.

He kept his mouth shut about it, because really... nobody had to say a word. And even though he didn't know the Meira brothers all _that_ well, he thought he'd heard Rock say something about the younger one being rather optimistic as well, and both of these boys had their mouths set in such grim lines that he thought their faces might freeze that way.

Neither of the Meira boys questioned where he'd come from or why he was pitching in to help evacuate. Maybe they knew, or maybe they didn't care. But kids liked him well enough and even though he had a bad feeling that all of this was for nothing, at least he'd be able to look for Rock while he ran through the city, saving everybody else.

The last time he'd seen Rock was about an hour and a half before he'd heard the screaming outside his apartment and gone outside. Three people—one of them a kid of about eight—were backed into a corner by a mob that just _looked_ wrong.

"Hey! Leave them alone!" he shouted, but the little mob didn't pay any attention, and Terry watched as they attacked as one fast, starving unit, and _bit the faces off of the kid and his family._

It was then that he noticed that all of Southtown was in chaos—or at least the parts that he could see from his apartment—and his instinct to protect himself won out, at least temporarily. He slammed the door and threw the deadbolt and really resisted the urge to drink. It was ten o'clock in the morning, and he had a feeling he'd need to be sober for this.

He'd unfortunately created a monster out of the little boy he'd taken responsibility for _(eight years old, his mind said, just like that poor little boy without a face outside)_ and as Rock had gotten older, his interests had progressed from science fiction to horror, and even though it wasn't his thing, he'd seen a few of those zombie movies. He didn't know how they'd gotten to Southtown, but he knew that was what they were.

And even though he knew he had to do something to stop them, he also knew that in the movies, a clean headshot was the only good way to stop them.

Terry had watched his father die from a gunshot wound and ever since then, he'd steered clear of weapons like that. His fists, he could use. Guns, he had no idea how to handle. In the end, he compromised with a baseball bat he confiscated from a closet and headed out to help where he could.

Southtown was a mess, with people panicking and trying to find their families and sometimes throwing complete strangers into the incoming zombie horde to give themselves a few more minutes. It seemed to him like things weren't too fucked just yet, or at least, there were more humans than non-humans and if they'd just _calm down_, they would probably have a fighting chance of getting these people out alive.

He found the Meira kids and they looked almost sickeningly grateful for his offer to help. The older one might've been the new King of Southtown, but he hadn't held the position for very long and somehow, Terry felt that even someone with as much town-boss experience as Geese Howard might have a hard time dealing with something like this (if he cared, which he wouldn't, and that made all the difference).

It seemed that in a crisis, even those who _wanted_ to follow orders lost their heads. Alba and Soiree (at this point, he figured, to hell with the formalities) had said a few friends were helping out in the beginning but they'd bailed just a few minutes into the work. Terry wasn't going to run, but of one thing, he was absolutely positive: he was never going to swing a baseball bat again. Especially not at another human being.

It wasn't that he didn't want to run, because some part of him just wanted to get out. He had responsibilities and people were counting on him, and somewhere in this mess—alive or dead—was Andy and Mai, a world of friends he'd made over the years, Mary, and Rock. He was tired, he'd been at this for hours and he was beginning to get a sunburn, but guilt twisted low in his gut and he only worked faster, trying to keep the regrets he didn't even know he had from taking over his brain.

_(should've been a better brother. should've tried harder. why is it that i feel like i could've been in love with her, should've tried to show her. he's the closest i'll ever have to a son of my own and i don't think he knows)_

Terry turned around to grab another wave of humans and bumped into Alba, who'd somehow lost his sunglasses in the past few hours, and who looked pale and terrified. "Soiree-" he began, and dissolved into either another language or some level of coherency that Terry couldn't quite understand. Possibly both. Terry chanced a glance at the silver haired boy standing behind his brother, panting and gripping his arm to stop the blood, and he understood.

The human numbers had dwindled, and Terry had been swinging his baseball bat more than helping people escape, and their three-man evacuation had just come to an end. "Go," he told Alba, "be with your brother. I'll go a little further in and see if I can't find more people." _Find my own family,_ he thought but didn't say.

So he started to walk. The further he got to the inner city, the worse it got. There seemed to be less humans this way, and less zombies as well—he supposed this meant that they had gotten wise to the evacuation and were heading that way. That, or maybe some of the other fighters who lived here were doing the same thing they had been, and fighting back.

But oh, God. The bodies. There were bodies everywhere. He was just glad that none of them were his friends.

Terry looked up at the sky—it was getting dark. He had absolutely no chance in the dark. Besides that, he didn't think he'd be able to find anyone at all in this eerily quiet, almost-deserted town.

"Terry."

He spun around, surprised. It was the best thing he'd ever seen—his little brother, looking exhausted and with his white clothes in tatters but thankfully not pale, sweaty, or bleeding. "Andy. You're okay?"

Andy gave him a smile—the saddest one he'd seen all day, he decided. "It's Mai," he said, and that's all he had to say. Terry understood the rest. Mai had been bitten, and Andy would stay with her.

He woke up in an abandoned apartment, sighed and stretched his tired muscles, and debated staying for a while. By his estimation, he'd walked through three-quarters of Southtown and hadn't found anyone that he knew except for Andy _(and he would not think of andy, because he had the burden of trying and failing to talk his little brother out of staying)_. He'd found the freshly-dead-again corpses of K' and Kula a few days ago, but no one living.

Terry's blind optimism came in handy, sometimes, but sometimes it was as much of a burden as anything else. He'd wasted a couple of days after finding his brother; he'd taken Andy home in the end, because at least if he wasn't going to let Terry talk him into getting to safety, then Terry wasn't going to miss his opportunity to say goodbye.

He'd combed the whole town. No sign of Mary or Rock. And he was definitely the worse for wear: the sunburn he'd developed when he was helping the Meira boys had worsened to the point where it made him sick, he knew he was dehydrated, and they probably weren't going to let him through to quarantine at this point, after he'd spent so much time in the contaminated zone. He was more or less unrecognizable. He was almost positive he'd have to cut off his hair, after this. No way all of the blood and zombie guts would come out, and that damn ponytail swung around too much to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.

He wouldn't let himself into quarantine.

But Terry Bogard had spent the better part of his life trying to help others, to show them that sometimes the best thing for you to do was to keep trying even when the deck was stacked against you. So he kept moving, because he didn't know what else to do.


	5. The First Breath You Take

**Full title: The First Breath You Take After You Give Up.  
**Still not my pond.

* * *

Even if they thought they had nothing, Kyo learned, there was always something to lose.

Alba had been the reluctant head of the city before it collapsed. He'd had a devoted right-hand man in his twin brother Soiree, a small gang of willing helpers, and the time and energy to take what Geese had ruined and turn it into something good again. He'd been slowly but surely gaining trust with the residents of the city, had successfully hosted his own King of Fighters tournament without a problem, and it had only been getting better.

Kyo had felt like he was on top of the world, himself. He'd moved to Southtown to continue fighting in the tournaments and to feel like he'd gained some measure of independence while he'd been traveling the world. His parents had surprisingly been supportive; they'd thrown a party to celebrate that and his new engagement. Yuki had plans to finish high school, but then she was going to join him and they were going to make a life together. He'd been ready.

Rock had spent his whole life fighting to be somebody other than who he was—Geese Howard's son. And nobody who was old enough to remember Geese Howard really blamed him. He'd mostly succeeded, too, finding something between "older brother" and "father" in Terry Bogard. Kyo was pretty sure their life couldn't have been perfect in any way—knowing what he did about Terry—but it had been enough for the teen, and it was easy to say that Rock had lost the most with the outbreak. The three of them had all lost family. Rock had lost his innocence and his carefully constructed persona.

It would have been easy for them to forget that Iori, too, had lost. He didn't have family in Southtown, that was true, and Kyo had only called the redhead as a desperate, last-ditch attempt to contact _someone_ and let them know about their new problem. Nobody else had answered their phone, if they hadn't been at his party in the first place. He'd not expected Iori to answer, much less to help him, and Kyo would have laughed out loud if someone had suggested to him that it would be _Yagami_ coaxing food down a kid's throat so he wouldn't be taken out of their cramped little cell.

They'd been stripped of everything they'd been: leaders, celebrities, fighters. Now, they were just four anonymous men sharing a cell in a quarantined area, not even given real clothes or decent food, and it was a struggle to bring themselves to care at all.

* * *

"It's Tuesday," Kyo said out loud, after seeing someone pass by with a newspaper. It was Kyo who marked the passage of time, watching closely for any indication of what day it was or how many had passed. There was a high, barred window in the cell, and the sun shone through it, which made it easy enough to tell daylight from dark. He kept tic marks on the wall beside his bed, and if he hadn't made a mistake in his counting, they'd been in quarantine for twenty-eight days. He added one day for their first night in the neutral zone—that made twenty-nine.

Nearly a month in oversized scrubs and boring white tennis shoes, he thought as he dutifully scrawled another tic mark on the wall. A month since they'd trained or gotten any sort of exercise other than the two or three times a week they all went outside and the walking they were permitted to do around the complex, and Kyo knew he wasn't the only one waking up in the middle of the night with muscles that were cramping from disuse.

In their cell, Rock was sleeping, and Alba was out gathering information, so nobody answered him when he announced what day it was. Kyo wasn't surprised. Only Iori responded in any way, turning his head so his hair fell over one red-brown eye as he laid on his bed. Kyo let himself look back, meeting Iori's eyes—or eye—without comment as he tried to figure what his companion might be thinking.

Their silent communication was broken as the door of their cell slid open. Kyo glanced away, meeting Alba's eyes as their fearless leader looked between the two of them with a curious look on his face. Apparently whatever question he was going to ask had been answered, because he moved past them to sit on his bed and share his news.

"We've been in here long enough that we can move to phase three if we want. That means an apartment in a building nearby and a little more freedom. They've released everyones' bank accounts, not that we can really do much with the money in here—but out there, I guess it's different. They're still..."

Alba trailed off and he glanced nervously at Rock before continuing, apparently trying to decide if he was really asleep or just pretending. "They're still pulling survivors out and the jail is overflowing. They're in terrible shape," he finished, his voice low. "I saw a couple of them on my way back here. They're mixing them in with everyone else, but I don't think anyone really expects them to live. They need a hospital, not an overcrowded jail."

_We need to get out of here for Rock's sake,_ Kyo heard, even though Alba didn't say it. There was still a good chance that Terry had survived; seeing him this close to death or even watching him die would probably ruin whatever headway Iori had managed to make with the teen.

And in the end, that was the deciding factor for all of them.

* * *

Quarantine and Reintegration: Phase Three, as it turned out, was a complex in what looked like the projects of the closest town. It was a simple brick building with nothing but one-bedroom apartments, but none of them complained. They'd all been sleeping in that cell for so long that Kyo briefly entertained the image of them all climbing, one by one, into the same bed just because they weren't used to sleeping alone anymore. At least they _had_ separate beds.

And really, the four rooms of their little apartment were better than they'd expected. Even if they were still guarded, it was less heavily than before, and they could come and go as they pleased. They learned quickly that in response to the "Southtown Threat," as it had been named, several of the neighboring towns had been evacuated and that was how they'd been managing to make space for the refugees.

It took a week of Iori growling threats into Rock's ear to make him eat or sleep. Kyo was responsible for cooking their meals, and it took that same week to figure out how to get the faulty stove to work. Alba concentrated his efforts on information gathering, using his status as former Don, or Boss, or whatever he called himself these days, because apparently running a city of the dead even granted you some special compensation.

And Kyo was almost positive that he'd woken up every night of that week to find Iori sitting silently outside of their bedroom.

* * *

"This has gone on long enough," Iori growled one day as he sat sullenly in the kitchen, watching Kyo divide their food into a week's worth of portions. Kyo didn't even have time to meet his eyes before the redhead was up and stalking off, hauling Rock up off of the couch by his collar and dragging him toward the door.

Baffled, Kyo followed, grabbing one of the keys they'd been assigned and locking the door carefully behind him. Iori hadn't given any indication that he was about to lose his marbles, and as far as Kyo could tell, Rock was the person he liked _most_ in their little household.

He didn't have far to go. Kyo found Iori and Rock in the big, abandoned lot behind their apartment complex, facing each other. Rock looked confused; Iori looked determined. The ruined Southtown was their backdrop, looking almost normal through the chain-link fence. "What are you doing?" he asked.

Iori's gaze flicked toward him. "This lounging around is acceptable for most people. It is _not_ acceptable for us. We are not most people. We are fighters. We were born, bred, and raised for better than this. Southtown might be dead and the King of Fighters tournament might have died with it, but that doesn't give us an excuse to waste away to nothing when we have a burden to bear." Iori dropped into his familiar fighting stance, turning his hard gaze back to Rock. "Now, _fight me._"

"I don't want to fight you," Rock replied. It was the first full sentence they'd heard him speak in a long time.

"I'm not giving you a choice."

Rock didn't take the bait. Kyo watched Iori's eyes narrow, glinting dangerously.

And then Iori straightened, turning his back on his unwilling opponent. "Suit yourself," he said carelessly. "If you choose to honor Bogard's memory by letting everything he taught you go to waste, that's your business. But I won't waste any more of my time on you."

To Rock's credit, he didn't make a noise as he dove for Iori. To Iori's credit, he turned and caught the fist aimed for the back of his head like he'd been expecting it. And he probably had. Just like that, they were fighting—or rather, Rock was fighting; Iori seemed content to block the blows and occasionally land a light kick of his own.

Watching them fight started a fire in Kyo's veins. He'd forgotten what it felt like to watch two people spar, and it made him want to jump in and join the exquisitely choreographed dance himself. Still, he stood perfectly still, watching and waiting until Rock finally stopped throwing punches, stepping back with his chest heaving and a look of gratitude, of _life_, in his red eyes.

Iori smirked, turning slightly and beckoning Kyo closer with his finger. Kyo found himself grinning back as he stepped closer. "I won't go easy on you, Kusanagi," Iori warned, but Kyo couldn't take it personally; the words sounded almost _teasing._

"Wouldn't expect you to... Yagami," Kyo responded, and charged.

They didn't use their powers, just fists and feet, and there were no winners or losers. When Iori and Kyo stopped to come up for air, Rock came back, and sparred against Kyo before the whole cycle started over again. They'd be sore tomorrow, but it was worth it now.

They fought until sunset, until they were all too winded and sweaty to continue. Iori hadn't apologized for what he'd said to Rock, but Kyo didn't expect him to. It wasn't Iori's style, and it had accomplished what it was intended for, anyway.

But their good moods faded as soon as Alba ran up to them, breathless and sweaty for another reason altogether. He was wide-eyed as he stared at the three of them, and Kyo's grin faded as Alba glanced at each of their faces.

"They've found Terry. He's alive."


End file.
